Marketing Begins at Hello: Personalizing Your Elevator Pitch
Marketing trends are evolving, allowing you to be able to connect with your audience on a more personal level throughout your entire sales cycle. Your marketing efforts can’t really be effective without proper messaging and targeting, leveraging a formalized method that identifies your audiences and intentionally serves up personalized content that creates connections and utilizes platforms for your audiences to address their needs and concerns. You are able to connect with strangers and start a relationship before ever having actual human contact. It’s amazing, it’s dynamic, and it’s the key towards enhancing your business development efforts.
Yet, even with the high level of automation and targeting inherent to modern communications, there will always be a need for good old face-to-face communications, especially for those in the conference circuit, where speaking to another person presents its own, unique opportunities and challenges. The question gets asked time and time again: “What do you do?” And here it comes, the same practiced, ingrained elevator pitch, regurgitated from memory, thrown out there again and again. The humanity and personalized touch that you strive so hard to produce in your marketing campaigns may become stripped if a boilerplate response comes out. So how can you take an opportunity with a potential prospect and use it as a way to engage and put you in a situation to close more deals from the start?
Plain and Simple: Build Your Elevator Pitch
There is a place for jargon and industry-specific keywords. This isn’t it. Never assume that someone you are talking to uses the same terminology that you (and your organization) do; always build your pitch for an average person within your industry. There is no quicker way to alienate someone than by using terms that are not relatable or, even worse, speaking through acronyms that are not commonplace. You want your audience to concentrate on your elevator pitch, not spend time trying to decipher terms they may not be familiar with. A simple and straightforward explanation also makes it easier for your audience to retain the key message you want them to remember.
Unique Value Propositions: Highlight What Makes You, You
It seems like a no-brainer, but many quick company overviews are high level to the point that they remove the actual point of differentiation. Your unique value propositions (USPs) are what will engage the person on the other end of the conversation. They are the reasons for them to care and to continue talking with you. They are also going to be the driving force for your organization’s future, demonstrating
that you have a plan for where you want to take your company tomorrow. Reinforce your organization with reference points too, but always be sure they are positive references. Convey how you similar companies in your space by comparing traits or sales cycles. But never do the opposite. “We are like company X ‘only smaller,”’ or “’with a reduced product line.’” Flattery will always get you everywhere, so don’t be afraid to talk yourself up. You know you deserve it!
Be Dynamic And Contextual
You are going to talk to many different people in your business life, each of them with a special role in their company’s ecosystem with different needs and pain points, which present unique opportunities to engage. It’s your job to be comfortable enough with your elevator pitch to craft it for each conversation. In the same way that you use contextual information for your digital marketing campaigns, be prepared with different versions of your pitch for potential clients. Use experienced influencers who can help you raise your product’s profile or make introductions to customers and investors. One size doesn’t fit all, so be prepared to change it up.
Lead the Way: Follow Up Strategies
Your pitch, while short and succinct, is also an opportunity to make an inquiry. Don’t end it with a period, end it with a question mark. After you explain your company’s purpose and direction, and while you still have the attention of your audience, ask a question to inspire them to imagine how your solution applies to them or if there’s a fit for something that you offer. You can even propose a potential integration point. Whatever it may be, you can choose to keep the conversation moving on your terms and provide clear next steps for sales follow up strategies. This will help you gather intel to guide the follow-up and steer your audience to where you’d like the conversation to go.
Keeping these tactics in mind will help you seize an opportunity to create a good and memorable first impression the next time you are asked the simplest question: what you do? Refining and personalizing your answer may be the key to creating a better relationship with prospects and achieving those 2019 goals.